Simplify!

I am sure I am not alone in my desire to simplify life. Most people, whose lives are equally cluttered with things accumulated over time and activities that are without much purpose would yearn for achieving the same goal. What I am not sure is why we have this yearning to simplify and how to resolve it.

Perhaps the root cause is nostalgia. We always look back at the past and think of it as “good old days.” For most of us, we had fewer things in life in the past and hence simplification gets equated with good times.

May be it is in our DNA. I read somewhere that going back to nature is like going home. It is where we came from and within ourselves there is a strong desire to get back. Living in a cottage surrounded by nature is probably the closest we can come to going “back home” according to this theory.

Talking about living in a cottage in a forest away from people of course brings us to Henry David Thoreau. His reason for doing what he did is very well articulated in his book Walden, written when he lived near Walden Pond in Concord, some five miles from our house in Acton. He says,” I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and when I came to die discover that I had not lived.” So perhaps, we desire to simplify because we believe that in doing so we will be able to learn what life has to teach.

That sounds like a really strong reason. However putting it to practice is another matter. For most of us, giving up everything and living in the woods in not practical or may not even be advisable. Only hermits like the mad man Unabomber would opt for such a life these days. Besides if all of us decide to do what Thoreau did, we would end up destroying all the woods and quickly starving to death.

However, that does not mean that we can not reduce the clutter. We can downsize from our large dwellings, generally without suffering much pain and reduce our possessions quite drastically. We can reduce many unnecessary activities and interactions without becoming a hermit or misanthrope.

Even that is easier said than done, but I believe it is necessary to at least make an attempt. I believe in Mr. Thoreau’s philosophy. I too do not want to discover that I had not lived when I came to die.

OK, so which ones of the twenty five magazines I subscribe to right now can I stop getting?